July 30, 2015

“If a single person comes and wants to hold the [gay pride] parade, then therefore in order to do something, something extreme is necessary.…these impure people want to defile Jerusalem [and]…the objective — I need to stop this parade."

“God forbid, that an unmarried yeshiva student at any level of learning, or a married student, even if he has problems with his income, should leave the holy guard post [yeshiva], and should not be enticed by any ‘haredi’ or non-haredi elements promising a future with money and honor if he joins some [IDF] course,” Cohen reportedly wrote, adding that everyone who lures or “entices [haredi yeshiva students to join the IDF] and incites [yeshiva students to leave their Torah studies to join the IDF] causes the masses to sin.”

Police say the haredi who allegedly stabbed 6 people at today's Jerusalem gay pride parade is Yishai Shlissel, the same person who committed the stabbing attack on the Jerusalem gay pride parade 10 years ago.

The Town of Mamakating, New York decided Monday night to go to court if necessary to stop the adjoining Village of Bloomingburg from issuing certificates of occupancy for completed units in Modern Orthodox developer Shalom Lamm’s 396-unit high-density hasidic townhouse development.

"I feel like the best response once anyone is incarcerated is to ask for their good treatment," Emma Shulevitz told FailedMessiah.com. "The challenge is to make [Rabbi Barry Freundel] into a good person who can do better. I believe he can change. I want to work on that side. If that means I am with the defense so be it."

July 29, 2015

The Knesset Internal Affairs Committee began an investigation of Jerusalem’s official state religious council and its associated kosher supervision company today after Jerusalem’s Zionist Orthodox Chief Rabbi Aryeh Stern went public with evidence of widespread corruption. Police are now deciding whether or not to open a criminal fraud and public corruption investigation.

The Israel Religious Action Center (an arm of the Reform Movement) has been a leading force in trying to obtain religious pluralism and gender equality in Israel. It has just released a new report, "Excluded, for God's Sake: Gender Segregation and the Exclusion of Women in the Public Sphere in Israel," that details the various types of haredi discrimination against women on planes, in buses, on public sidewalks and in other public venues and explains what is and what should be done about it. Here's the report:

An Israeli man had a beard for 14 years and then without telling his family, shaved it off as part of a commercial for an Israeli razor company. The commercial is a 3-minute unscripted documentary, and it perfectly illustrates in the reverse what BTs who grow beards and ex-haredim who suddenly shave them off often go through with their families. Watch it and see what I mean.

"Our college is supportive of medicinal development and research," said Alan H. Kadish, president of the Touro College System. "There is still a great deal of research to be conducted on the medical application of cannabis and we are excited by the opportunity to contribute in a meaningful way. We will also offer CanniCare advice on the clinical use of the medicine along the way."

In one incident, a tour guide escorting two tourists was shoved by a haredi man wielding a shtender (lectern). He also blocked the entrance to the prayer room as he screamed at the tourists. The visitors reportedly fled in terror.

After years of ignoring individual complaints, New York City reportedly says it will investigate a complaint from 52 parents, graduates and former teachers of haredi yeshivas that alleges dozens of Brooklyn haredi yeshivas (and one in Queens, as well) violate New York State education law by inadequately teaching secular subjects or by failing to teach them at all.

July 28, 2015

Rabbi Gavriel Bodenheimer, originally charged with three counts of a first-degree criminal sexual act and one count of first-degree sex abuse for alleged oral and anal sex with a 5-year-old child, pleaded guilty today to endangering the welfare of a child, which is a misdemeanor.

The scandal-plagued haredi-controlled East Ramapo school district overpaid two law firms by more than $2 million over a two-year period for their work in defending the district in a single case, a New York State judge has found.

Rather than outsource to India for cheap labor, Israel's high tech companies are increasingly setting up centers in haredi areas and hiring haredim, almost all of whom are women, to fill those roles. But the dirty little secret of the Israeli high tech boom is two-fold and truly ugly: men get paid significantly more than women for doing the exact same jobs, and haredi women get paid significantly less than secular women do.

In the haredi town of Elad, Israel, work does not pay. More than 100 girls, Sefardim and Ashkenazim, were denied places in the only two girls high school yeshivas (known as seminaries) in Elad for one reason and one reason only – their parents work for a living.

The Nassau County, New York Police Department that serves the 5 Towns area of Long Island is looking for a man driving in a Black Infiniti who allegedly tried to lure a 5-year-old girl into his car last week on Marlborough Road in Cedarhurst.

On advice of her rabbi, “C” called police – twice. And police came twice and tried to speak with her upstairs neighbor, who refused to answer his door. But because this is Israel where the rule of law is very porous, police are often inept and, in haredi cities, are oftentimes functioning under the control of local haredi fixers and rabbis, police did nothing about it. So "C" took her case to civil court – and was promptly excommunicated by her city's chief rabbi and his beit din. And what Israel's High Court of Justice and AG may have to do to right the wrongs done to "C" by these haredi rabbis and neighbors may very well spark a religious war.

In Israel, as opposed to the United States, worshipers don’t wait for the rabbis to allow them to pray under equal conditions. In light of the attempts to stop them, Prof. Tamar Ross, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Bar-Ilan University and one of the pioneers of the religious feminist wave, recently said: “The train has left the station; the rabbis can throw stones at the windows and shout ‘Shabbes, Shabbes.’”

“I went out to help her and realized something was blocking it. When I finally managed to open it, I noticed that someone had assembled four [heavy concrete] flowerpots in front of it to block it. Somebody had also tied a piece of rope at neck height across the frame of the door. Another piece of rope was tied across the stairwell in a separate part of the building, clearly in an attempt to cause people to trip.”

July 24, 2015

A source familiar with the circus surrounding New York State's pending award of medical marijuana production/distribution licenses tells FailedMessiah.com that in response to a bid for one of those five licenses by a hasidic-controlled company that (falsely) claimed kosher medical marijuana was necessary to meet the religious requirements of the state's kosher consumers, companies bidding for these five licenses have now approached hasidic powerbrokers to partner with them so New York State will consider their applications more favorably.

"…In most places and at most times, foraging provided ideal nutrition. That is hardly surprising -- this had been the human diet for hundreds of thousands of years, and the human body was well adapted to it. Evidence from fossilised skeletons indicates that ancient foragers were less likely to suffer from starvation or malnutrition, and were generally taller and healthier than their peasant descendants. Average life expectancy was apparently just thirty to forty years, but this was due largely to the high incidence of child mortality. Children who made it through the perilous first years had a good chance of reaching the age of sixty, and some even made it to their eighties. Among modern foragers, forty-five-year-old women can expect to live another twenty years, and about 5-8 per cent of the population is over sixty.…"

"…The truly unique feature of [Homo Sapiens or Sapiens] language is not its ability to transmit information about the [tangible]. Rather, it's the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all.…only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don't really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. [But you could do so with humans.]…"

The new study offers evidence that early humans clearly functioned with a basic knowledge of agriculture and, perhaps more importantly, exhibited foresight and extensive agricultural planning more than 10,000 years earlier than previously believed.

"…In order to understand you better, I have read your book, Hilkhot Hakotel, cover to cover. In your letter you say that you are a moderator, bridging the gap between extremes, but your book was written by someone whose world view is very extreme. How else do you explain the fact that in 530 pages you devote only seven lines to the subject of women? Unfortunately, you spent this precious space deliberating on how women should not gaze at the Torah during their menstrual cycle.…"

The Nazareth District Court sentenced a haredi rabbi from Afula to nine years in prison today for sexually abusing four teens. He represented the sex to the teens as being ordered by God and as being a mystical cure for various problems they had.

I didn't want to have to write this. A very tragic part of life is that some people commit suicide. They often do so even when they have loving families and a good support system. But that does not mean the shunning many ex-haredim suffer at the hands of their families and former communities doesn't play a role.

"…One woman carrying in a table, which we bring because no tables are provided for women, was stopped and she was told, “Tables are not allowed.” Another woman was told that siddurim [prayer books] were not allowed to be brought in to the Kotel [Western Wall plaza and prayer areas].…Journalists were told that they could not bring cameras in without prior permission from the Western Wall Heritage foundation.…"

After finding widespread alleged corruption, including many rabbis who hold no-show jobs as kosher supervisors for the city's kosher supervision agency, top aide to the new Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem Aryeh Stern is slated for dismissal by the allegedly corrupt rabbis who control Jerusalem's official government religious council. Stern is Zionist Orthodox and a relative moderate, as is his top aide, Avinoam Kushner. The corrupt rabbis and public officials Stern and Kushner are fighting appear to be haredi and Sefardi-haredi.